Exile's Valor v(-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  What were they doing here?

  But Mical’s punishment was long since over; what could he possibly have been doing out here? It wasn’t for pleasure; he looked practically blue with cold, and he must have been here the entire time they’d been playing.

  “Weaponsmaster Alberich?” the boy called, as soon as he was within easy conversational distance. “Can we volunteer to be that substitute?”

  Alberich raised an eyebrow, making certain that none of his considerable surprise showed on his face, although his jaw ached with the effort of keeping it from dropping. He knew very well that young Mical had a reputation as a demon Hurlee player, despite the late start that he and Eloran had on it because of the punishment work he’d been doing. But that was regular Hurlee, not this—this combat version. Surely no one sane would volunteer for this, not after today, not seeing that the Weaponsmaster would injure one of the Trainees and apparently not think twice about it. And Mical had at least three more years to go in his training, not one or less than one.

  “How long have you watching been?” he asked, keeping his tone flat. He expected to hear a slightly cocky “Long enough,” but once again he got a surprise.

  “A little more than two moons,” Mical replied. “It took me a while to get my chores scheduled so I had the candlemark free. I heard about it, and I started watching. At first it was—well, because it was Hurlee.” He emphasized the game as if invoking the name alone would explain everything. “Then I stayed.”

  Kantor snorted. :Well, well. This is interesting.:

  “This no kind of game is,” Alberich told him, harshly. “Not anymore. Not this group. There is this, serious injury today. More, there are likely to be.”

  “I know that, Weaponsmaster,” Mical replied, head up, eyes blazing. “But I’m good, really good at regular Hurlee, and I want to help.” His Companion moved forward until he was nearly nose-to-nose with Alberich, and the rest of his speech was made in a whisper. “I know why you’re doing this,” he continued, and if his hands and voice trembled a little, his gaze was firm. “That is, I think I know what you’re doing. You’re training up a bunch of people who are always at the Collegium until they graduate into Whites, and who nobody is going to even consider as adequate protection. Not even the Queen, so we could go anywhere. You think that if the Queen ever leaves the Palace grounds, someone is going to try to kidnap her. Maybe even the Prince’s friends, to try and get the Queen and the Council to agree to make him a King.”

  Since that was very near to what Alberich was afraid of, he actually started, and stared at the boy, and this time he didn’t even try to keep his jaw from dropping. “But—how—” he began.

  Mical shrugged. “Healer Crathach is my second cousin, and my uncle knows people who know the Prince’s set. I’m good at putting things together, and my Gift is Touchreading.” At Alberich’s puzzled look, he explained. “If I pick up something barehanded, and I want to know, sometimes I can tell where it’s been and what it’s been doing going back to when it was first made.” He gulped. “I haven’t had it working for long, not so I could trust it. Otherwise I’d have told you.”

  Alberich blinked again. So did Kantor. :I was under the impression that Mical’s Gift was fairly unreliable.:

  “My Gift-teacher still thinks it’s unreliable,” Mical continued. “But in the last moon it’s been getting a bit more under control, and that was when I noticed something. If someone has been handling what I pick up very recently, and feeling strongly about something, it’s pretty dead-accurate. I can pick up bits of what they’ve been thinking about. When I realized there was something strange about this Hurlee team, I—” He flushed. “I started snooping on you. You’ve been awfully worried lately, and you’ve been doing a lot of repairs on the practice equipment.” His chin firmed. “I know this is dangerous; you just cracked Harrow’s skull for him, and that was just in practice! But I still want to help.”

  Alberich thought about it for a long, long moment, as the snow fell all about them, sealing them off from the rest of the world inside a wall of white curtains.

  “All right,” he said at last. “Come down to the salle with me. I will need to measure you, and get you armor. And your gods be with you.”

  ***

  Mical went off with his measurements taken, a set of armor of the approximate size ready for him, and an admonishment to say nothing of his speculations, not even to his fellows on the team. “Tell them that you are the substitute, you may,” Alberich told him. “If you care to.”

  Mical just shook his head. “They aren’t my yearmates, and it’ll be better coming from you,” he replied, showing a maturity that Alberich hadn’t expected. “If you say it, they’ll just figure you picked the best you could think of. If I do, it’ll sound like I’m boasting.”

  It sounded as if young Mical had learned a lot more in that glassworks than how to make mirrors.

  And there had not been one single attempt on Mical’s part to suggest some of the stage-fighting techniques he had been so enamored with a year ago. He’d done a great deal of physical growing in the past year, too; he’d gone from weedy adolescent to a young powerhouse with muscles as hard as rocks. It was no wonder that he was reputed to be such a demon Hurlee player. Evidently pumping those bellows had been very good for him.

  But as Alberich brooded over his solitary supper, he was still worried. The boy might be big and strong, but he was still a boy, still three years younger than the rest of the team. He’d volunteered, but did Alberich have the right to accept him? He thought of poor Harrow, even now being taken care of by the Healers. He would be throwing young Mical into the middle of a team that was already playing a deadly game; they’d had moons of practice at it, and Mical and Eloran didn’t.

  :But he’s been watching,: Kantor reminded him.

  :Watching isn’t the same as playing.: Would Mical just end up in a bed next to Harrow in the next day or two?

  :Eloran is getting some special coaching, this minute,: Kantor told him. :This business is half the Companion’s job, remember. And Eloran is a lot faster than Harrow’s Companion.:

  Another shock; this was a day full of them. :I thought all of you were fairly equal—:

  :Oh, no. Not that any of us is the Companion equivalent of Myste—: There was a snicker in that, and Alberich could hardly blame him. Poor Myste! By now she was so notorious that Selenay just had a page assigned to her to follow around behind her, picking up the things she dropped and gathering up the things she put down and forgot. Well, she might forget where she left her spare pair of lenses; she never forgot a fact, a law, or a precedent.

  :Some of us have different priorities,: he replied truthfully.

  :As do we. At any rate, Eloran is a little nimbler than Lekaron, with slightly better reactions. That should make up for lack of experience.: But he detected a hint of doubt in Kantor’s mind-voice, and oddly enough, that comforted him. If Kantor was having feelings of guilt, at least it meant that Alberich wasn’t being overly nice about this situation.

  :They’re terribly young,: he said gloomily.

  :Lavan Firestorm and his Companion weren’t any older.:

  :And Lavan never got the opportunity to grow any older.:

  Kantor was silent for a moment. :Lavan never really got the opportunity to volunteer. Mical did.:

  There was that. But could someone that young have any real idea of what he was volunteering for? Bad enough to take the Trainees he had—all adolescents to one extent or another thought they were immortal, that death was something that happened to someone else; the older lot at least were well aware that they could be horribly hurt. But fifteen-year-olds truly thought that they were immortal, yes, and invulnerable, that even injuries would nod and pass on by. And in spite of what he’d seen, was this truly informed consent?

  :When do you trust someone?: Kantor asked, seemingly out of the blue.

  :Excuse me?:

  :When do you trust someone? Is it by age, or maturity? What
is the magic number? When do Trainees start to think like adults?:

  He understood what Kantor was saying, of course, and his head agreed with it. Mical had been there on the worst day the team had experienced. He’d watched them for two moons at least. And he’d evidently learned some sobering lessons in the glassworks.

  He’d shown every sign of acting in a measured and mature fashion this afternoon. So when did Alberich stop doubting and start trusting?

  :When my gut decides to go along with my head, I suppose,: he replied glumly. :And my gut is going to be screaming, “but he’s only a child!” for a little while longer at least.:

  He might have said something more, but at just that moment, a bell rang out, cutting across the winter night.

  And for one, horrible moment, he thought it was the Death Bell, and his thoughts fastened on Harrow—

  But no, it wasn’t. It was the Great Bell at the Palace—not the Collegium Bell, that sounded the candlemarks and the meals, but the huge, deep-toned Bell that sounded only for major occasions. So what—

  A moment later, his question was answered.

  :It’s time! It’s Selenay!: said Kantor, and given the gravid condition of the Queen, that was all Kantor needed to say.

  Selenay had gone into labor. By dawn, Valdemar would have an Heir-Presumptive.

  And from that moment on, the Queen would be standing between Prince Karathanelan and his ambitions.

  Alberich shivered. It had begun.

  21

  “I’m sorry, Weaponsmaster,” Mical sighed. He pushed the papers away from him, and reluctantly, Alberich took them and folded them up, tightly. “All I get from them is—” he screwed up his face, “—the writer was in a hurry, really annoyed with something, and wanted to get this over with. I think he was that actor fellow—the one we all thought was so—interesting.” He paused again, then smiled wanly. “And about the only thing that I can tell you besides that is that he thought the person he was writing to was very, very thick.”

  Alberich sighed. It had been a long shot, of course. He’d hoped that somehow the secret instructions from Norris to the Prince would have some link to the unknown patron. But—no luck, it seemed. Whoever the patron was, Norris had not been thinking of him when he’d been writing the Prince’s “scripts.”

  “My thanks, regardless, Mical,” he said. He saw Mical glancing with longing at the door, and he found a bit of sympathy for the boy. It was the first fine day in—well, since autumn. And Mical, no longer under punishment-duty, was probably afire to be out in it. “Go along—”

  He hadn’t so much as gotten the words out when Mical was out the door like a shot.

  “Frustrating,” said Myste redundantly. “We’ve got one end of the path—Norris to Karath. We have the other, Devlin to Norris. But we still don’t have the so-called ’patron’ who links it all into a neat circle.”

  “Nor will we,” Alberich said with grim certainty. “I believe it was the same person who was paying for unrest against the Queen earlier. I even believe it was the same person who was selling information out of the Council during the Wars. And I have my suspicions who that person is. Unfortunately, I do not have a shred of proof. He is too clever at covering his tracks and hiding his identity. He is probably in disguise most of the time when he deals with underlings.”

  This “certainty” was not true Foresight, but it came with the scent of Foresight on it. He would have liked to confide his suspicions to someone who had some other Gift that might be used to spy upon this person, but unfortunately, the suspicion was so wild that he knew that even the Heralds would have stared at him with incredulity.

  Yes, even Talamir. Even Myste.

  Even, perhaps, most of the Companions.

  :But not me,: said Kantor, with equal certainty. :So you and I will watch and wait and bide our time—quietly. We’ll catch him eventually.:

  “So all we can do is keep a guard on Selenay?” Myste asked mournfully.

  “It seems so,” he replied. She sighed.

  :I wish I could tell her,: he said to his Companion.

  :You can when it’s over,: Kantor replied. :You’re used to keeping secrets.:

  And that, alas, was only too true.

  It was just too bad that Selenay had not realized that little fact before all of this had begun, and had confided in him rather than—well—whoever she had, who had been so poor at keeping them.

  ***

  Selenay tried to concentrate on the reports in front of her, but her eyes kept drifting to the window, and her thoughts drifting off into nothingness. It was only two moons since the baby’s birth. Two moons. Spring was just beginning outside those windows, and she was stuck inside. And when she managed to wrench her eyes and her thoughts back to the job at hand, an angry wail from the next room cut across her concentration and she winced, and shoved down the surge of angry irritation that made her want to go into the nursery and put a pillow over baby Elspeth’s face—

  And immediately, she felt sick with guilt.

  —horrible thought. She was a horrible mother. How could she think such things about the baby? She should have been all moony-eyed and willing to bear with anything. She should be longing to hold Elspeth, to cradle her for hours and hours, she should be spending every waking moment hovering over the cradle, gazing down at the little mite with adoration.

  Instead, she had thoughts of wanting to smother the poor thing. She was unfit to be a mother. She should never have had a child. . . .

  :That’s not a child,: Caryo said testily. :It’s a stomach with a warhorn attached to one end, and a mechanism that produces more excrement than a full-grown cow attached to the other.:

  Selenay was glad that there wasn’t anyone in the room to see her as she choked on a laugh. There was some truth to that, though Selenay herself seldom had to attend to the latter. Still. The former—

  Elspeth’s wails scaled up a notch. Selenay’s own nurse, old Melidy, was in charge of the nursery, but she seemed to have her hands full with Elspeth, who had an awfully robust set of lungs for something so small, and the need to demand attention constantly.

  Do all babies cry so much?

  At least baby Elspeth’s demands were reasonable; milk, comfort, a clean napkin. Unlike her father. . . .

  Selenay’s irritation increased, as did her headache.

  He’d been pouting again this morning. He didn’t even have to say anything anymore, just pout and look aggrieved and put-upon. His pouts didn’t seem quite so attractive anymore either, and his bereft-orphan pose was beginning to look a great deal more like a pose than like her own, real grief. She knew what true mourning looked like, from the inside, and—well, all his protestations to the contrary, it had begun to look to her as if his father’s death and brother’s estrangement were things he really didn’t feel deeply about.

  If at all.

  Oh, come now! said her conscience. You can’t blame him for wanting to be a King, now that his brother is King of Rethwellan. And he’s been thoroughly agreeable since Elspeth was born. Didn’t he say he had sent for his old nurse for her, so that old Melidy wouldn’t have to do all the looking-after by herself? And with two Chief Nursery Attendants on the job, there shouldn’t be any more of this howling while you’re trying to get some work done.

  Agreeable he might be, but she couldn’t help the feeling that it was all on the surface. He certainly wasn’t about whenever something needed doing. When they retired for the evening and she wanted to tell him about the annoyances of the day, just to get them off her chest, he would launch off into some hunting story or other, ignoring her hints that another topic—any other topic—would be welcome. And what had happened to Karath the lover? All very well to speak tenderly of wanting to give her plenty of time to recover from Elspeth’s birth, but just how long did he think she needed?

  Besides, it wouldn’t hurt her to be held and comforted, now and again. She could do with more of the commiseration about the burdens of the Crown that he u
sed to give her, and less complaining that he wanted the crown himself.

  He’s the father of your child, she reminded herself. Though as Elspeth’s wails turned into distinctly angry howls, that was seeming less and less of a good thing.

  Finally, just when she thought that her head was going to split, she heard the sound of feet running into the nursery and the howls cut off—and lest she worry that someone else had put a pillow over the baby’s face, she heard suckling and cooing noises. The wet nurse had been found, it seemed. Her Highness was now satisfied.